Free advice

Thinking and writing about people in public life is what I do for work, and I usually save that part of my brain and work product for the paper. So to avoid conflicts of professional interests of various kinds, I don’t write a lot here about overtly political topics.

But after watching last night’s presidential debate, I have some free advice and thoughts for both men that would never, ever make it into the paper:

One of you boys should suggest at your third debate (not the next one, which is a town hall deal) that you drop all these silly rules and go at it like real men. Mr. Kerry, you almost – almost – said this, but it looked like you were doing it in jest.

Hey, even if you just loosened up your rules a bit to let the moderator extend a good back and forth for more than a minute, that’d be good. Let the moderator say, “You know what, this is a good discussion, let’s do another two minutes.”

Mr. Kerry, please ask the Mr. Bush to stop suggesting that it’s unpatriotic to disagree with a sitting president, even a wartime one. You’re letting him suggest to folks you’re a bad, bad man simply because you disagree with him. Fight back. (By the way, the lights on the podium weren't all that distracting so quit your whinin'.)

Mr. Bush, take a deep breath. I know Mr. Kerry was a little pointed tonight, but that’s his job being the challenger and all. Now that you’ve done your pounding on Mr. Kerry, would you mind telling us about your plans and thoughts? While you did well laying out where your opponent fell short, you didn’t do so well laying out why you measure up.

Over all, boys, the debate was better than I expected. The format was dreadful but Jim Lehrer kept things humming pretty well. And you both scored solid B+ performances, especially given prior expectations. Certainly, those who find themselves undecided on who to vote for got a clear picture of two very different guys Thursday night. Neither one of you scored a kill shot a la Reagan’s “There you go again” quip on Jimmy Carter, but you have two more debates to try.

I can’t wait to watch the VP candidates on Tuesday.

On a rant

No. Not me. This guy. (Link via Romenesko).

I’ve never read Nick Coleman before. I have no reason to think he’s anything other than a fine upstanding member of my profession.

Except he doesn’t get it:

Do bloggers have the credentials of real journalists? No. Bloggers are hobby hacks, the Internet version of the sad loners who used to listen to police radios in their bachelor apartments and think they were involved in the world.

Bloggers don't know about anything that happened before they sat down to share their every thought with the moon. Like graffiti artists, they tag the public square -- without editors, correction policies or community standards. And so their tripe is often as vicious as it is vacuous.

A couple problems here. First, he’s confusing the medium and the message. A blog is just a tool. You put crap on it, you have a crap blog. You put news on it, you have a news blog.

Second, there are plenty of real journalists with blogs and plenty of news organizations waking up to their potential. (For example, here’s one a write a work.)

And then there are the “Education blogs, science blogs, and foreign-policy blogs” cited by Virginia Postrel that seemingly don’t even figure into Coleman’s calculus here. (Link via Thoughtsignals and my former colleague Mark Tosczak, who probably has more time to blog now that he works for a publication that publishes only once a week.)

So I’m thinking Coleman is misusing the word blog to label a class of content producers that he doesn’t like. To be fair, if I get the gist of his column right, Coleman may have been unfairly labeled himself. Still, as someone who works with words, he should know better than to lash out so indiscriminately.

Why bother to point this out? Bloggers who want to be taken seriously can’t afford to have the term "blogger" become a stand-in for crackpot or what Mr. Coleman would label “hobby hack.” If this perception latches on, those in the blogsphere will get disaffected, the folks who stay the heck out of the blogsphere because they think like Coleman will marginalize bloggers. The two worlds will diverge. Trust me, this is not the direction we want to be going.

There are consequences for those who Coleman would call “real journalists” who happen to want to use blogs to convey the news. If the medium itself is seen as unreliable, it won’t matter what we put up there, no one will read or trust it. And that would be a shame.

So this is my plea for a little precision. Go ahead, attack the hacks, sleaze bags, liars and crap purveyors. But label them as such. Blaming the blog medium for producing crap is a bit like blaming the newsprint for producing The National Enquirer.

Decaffeinated

So it turns out my thing getting over caffeine addiction is a real live syndrome thing and not just made up. (That link comes courtesy of Mr. Sun). At any rate, I seem to be past the head-achy, non-fun aspects of this and onto the somewhat bemusing bits.

Side effects in this latter stage include: A burgeoning fetish over Coca-Cola bottles. You know, the 20-ouncers made to look like the old time bottles. They have the long necks perched over a curvy midsection. When they’re nice and cold, droplets of condensation trace a slow, meandering path to its base. And there’s the sweet, brown color …

Ah-hem.

Also, when I’ve walked toward a soda machine at work in the past few days, more than one co-worker has called out, “no, don’t do it.”

Really interesting possible effect: For the first time in … well for the first time that I can remember, I woke up on my own this morning. No alarm clock. No screaming child. I was just awake and ready to start the day. Is this some sort of weir paradox and the absence of caffeine actually makes waking up easier?

On the wagon

I’ve been feeling crappy lately. But don’t feel sorry for me, especially since the last couple days of crappiness have been self inflicted.

You see, I’ve gone on the wagon.

Given up beer? No. Don’t be silly. Beer is life, or at least a healthy part of it.

Given up the hard stuff? Nope. Never took up booze.

Given up something that the police might have an interest in? Nope. Never did drugs.

It’s not cigarettes either.

What I’ve given up – or at least am trying to cut waaay back on – may be the most widely available psychotropic substance in the U.S.

It’s caffeine.

Some of my co-workers can tell you that I’m capable of ingesting prodigious amounts of caffeinated beverages, even by newsroom standards. All of that was fine and good when I was younger and my body was good a rinsing out all the contaminants I dumped into it.

But now I’m old, and getting flabby, and not sleeping well and just generally feeling crappy. And I’ve been relying on caffeine to power me through my days. I don’t like that feeling. It’s not real energy, just sort of a nervous alertness for the mind that can’t bring the rest of the body along for the ride.

More back story: A few months ago I was exploring TV chef Alton Brown’s page and found that – of course – he had a blog.

( You can find Alton’s blog here, although there are no handy links for individual posts. Should you be inclined to scroll through, posts on Sunday, July 18, 2004, Saturday, May 15, 2004, and Friday, May 07, 2004 are relevant to this line of thought.)

At any rate, Alton was discussing why he was giving up certain foods, among them high fructose corn syrup. After doing a little research of my own on high fructose corn syrup, I decided he was dead on and have purged it from my kitchen as well. My family’s eating habits have been better for it.

Well, based on that little experiment and my growing discomfort on the caffeine reliance thing, I’m giving it up. Not entirely, but enough that it should make a difference. My new limit is 20 oz of caffeinated diet cola a day. (That's the equivalent of one bottle out of a standard vending machine around here.) Coffee is out, at least for now. (Oh, how I’m going to rue that decision.) I’m not a big tea drinker, so that’s no problem.

I’m hoping that cutting my dependency will also produce good collateral side effects, like a more settled sleep pattern. And I’m hoping to make a few other lifestyle improvements that will combine with the lack of caffeine to do even more good.

The plan is already in effect. I can report that I’ve only had one 12 ounce can of soda over the weekend. Of course, I’ve been lying around the house catching naps like a lobotomized sloth. And I’m only now ridding myself of a head ache that felt like I slammed my noggin into a brick wall a few dozens times.

Yup, this is real withdrawal folks. Oh, it’s nothing compared to the DTs that come with alcohol withdrawal. I saw those bad boys up close and personal when I interned at a mental hospital during college. Those folks had it rough. My symptoms are tolerable, but there’s not mistaking what they are.

I’ll report back in should I notice any stellar improvements in my health or attitude attributable to the caffeine dump. And if I hop off the wagon in a big way, I’ll report that too.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go fetch myself some water. Yuck.

On voice

Mr. Sun opened up a can of worms this week when he wrote about voice here. The quick and dirty summary (which doesn’t come with all the fun comments) is that the mystery blogger likes the blogs at the News & Record (my employer) because they allow the writers to use more of their own voice.

Mr. Sun gets no argument from me there.

Lex picked up on the theme here. (Again, go for the post, stay for the comments.) And then newsroom honcho John Robinson jumped into the conversation here. Also worth checking out (and maybe related) is Robinson’s post on consumer trust. And if you’re looking for a long, bloated, undirected paean to the political blogger, check out the New York Times’ Sunday magazine piece here.

If I were to distill all of that down to one rhetorical question, it would go something like: Wouldn’t it be great if news writers could develop more voice and therefore capture more readers?

Everybody up to speed? Good. Now you get my two cents. (More like 102 cents, given the length of this screed. And just to make things clear: this is my screed and in no way intentionally reflects the opinions/thoughts/policies of anyone else who happens to work for my newspaper.)

One of the standard interview questions that someone interviewing for a news writing staff job, particularly an entry level one, of almost any daily paper in the country is sure to get goes something like: “Which are you better at, reporting or writing.”

For 99 percent of the reporters in a newsroom, the answer is “reporting.” You can train someone to be a reporter. Reporting is fun, most of the time. Reporting lets you challenge authority. Reporting is instinctive. You give a report to the bartender when he says, “So, how’s it going?” and you tell him about your day.

Writing’s a bitch. No, check that. I’m writing’s bitch. She owns my butt and kicks it on a daily basis.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy writing. It’s what first attracted me to the business. But it’s hard work. And it’s something you only get better at by doing it. You can teach grammar, parts of a news story, the anatomy of a 30-30-30 brief, the proper use of quotations. That’s all mechanics.

Writing is different.

When you’re writing, each sentence you put down on paper makes someone want to read your next one. You can use mechanics to convey information; writing seduces the reader. On my best days, I can pull off one, maybe two or three sentences like that, usually after a dozen rewrites. But I’ve only been really been working at the craft for about a decade or so.

So we each have writers that speak to us, whose voices seduce us. And someone who can do it on deadline, for a newspaper, conveying the important issues of the day or offering a profile or investigative story of merit, well they’re the best my profession has to offer.

Those writers are offering something other than voice, though. They’re offering facts, gathered at the cost of a lot of time and energy. Ask Hoggard how much work Maria Johnson put in on the profile that he cites so much. Ask Lex how much work our colleague Stan Swofford put in on his Project Homestead series.

What’s the flip side? What’s voice without work, without reporting?

In some cases it’s what you get from some (I emphasize some) bloggers, who merely comment on or amplify on the day’s events, those who merely offer their observations on the world or link to and comment on the work others have done. They’re harmless, sometimes even useful.

In the worst cases you get Jayson Blair. Blair was … (He’s still breathing? Shit.) Blair is a gifted writer, and gifted at recognizing good writing. But he didn’t do the reporting work and a lot of good people have paid the consequences for it. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to be one of them.

So now we come to it. Give me the choice between being Blair or toiling away in relative anonymity, I guess I’m a fool (and am giving up those $3,000 a night speaking fees) but I’ll lurk here in the shadows, thank you very much.

But wait? Surely there’s a solution. Surely, there’s some way for working stiffs like me (read: folks who report on government, politics and civic life) to give voice to their writing and preserve our roles as unbiased arbiters.

I think there is. But as a group, the news writing industry (newspapers, magazines, newsletters, etc… Screw TV) is groping and lurching towards it. Here' my humble take from the shallow end of the newsroom food chain:

Part of our problem is that newspapers, as organizations, live in a risky, disorderly world and yet we try to minimize risk and instill order. Our editing techniques, our standard news writing styles, all of the mechanics we use are designed to minimize mistakes and misperceptions.

They also have the unfortunate, undesigned side effect of draining the life out of even an interesting topic. And any editor who says they’ve never drained the life (intentionally or not) out of a story, is lying to you. It happens, sometimes against the force of our best efforts, but it happens. We may encourage individual risk taking, but at the end of the day with deadlines bearing down and a whole-god-damned newspaper to put out, as a group we fall back on what we know, what’s safe.

I don’t buy the argument that newspapers may need to go back to having an ideological bent, either politically left or right. I think that would be a stupid move. It would give up a franchise this industry has worked a century to build.

Instead, I suggest we become aggressively centrist, advocates for common sense. We should call shenanigans on whoever produces the idiocy of the day, be they Democrat, Republican, unaffiliated, whatever. (A lot of the truly evil stuff in this world has to do with greed, not ideology.) We should strive to be advocates for our readers, for all the citizenry that we serve no matter their political bent. I think this is, and will remain, central to a newspaper’s mission.

We should write more stories. I put lots of reports and analyses in the paper. They’re dull and hard to read and I’ll be the first one to tell you that. Stories have characters and plot and give readers a reason to stay with them all the way to the end.

Some times reports have information you need. Reading them is like eating your vegetables; it’s good for you so you have to do it sometimes. Who ever raves about the vegetables that come with a restaurant's entree? Stories are the dessert that makes you book your next reservation.

Simply put, the writer’s voice needs to better and more fully employed in the service of our core mission: to deliver the news.

In a world where realm of news and commentary sources is fragmenting quickly, a newspaper’s mission would seem clear: give people a common lexicon, a common set of facts from which to work. Offer those facts in such a way (with voice, if that's the right term) that minds addled by the cable television and talk radio can accept them. Offer them without fear or favor. Continue to work at it even when we get knocked on our ass and beaten up for doing it.

Is my blog voice going to invade the newspaper pages? Probably not any time soon. Realistically, I think most of us humble writers will have to keep the angry beasts that we can unleash on the Internet in their cages when it comes to print. But don’t be surprised if you hear those cages rattling in the rustle of the newsprint from time to time.

That’s what I’m going to be working on at any rate.

Ya’ want confession with those stitches?

The NY Times buried the lead when they left this paragraph at the end of a story on the federal government offering it’s employees a “Catholic health plan:”

Representative Pete Stark of California, the senior Democrat on the health subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a telephone interview: "Medical care is a science. Getting medical care and religion mixed together is just as bad as getting church and state mixed together."

This is not to say religion is bad, or medicine, or government, or politics. Each has their place. But I don’t want a politician telling me what to worship or a priest giving me a surgical consult.

Am I over-reacting, or are we heading down a scary path here?

Avast!

Arrrr! Sunday, Sept. 19 is “Talk Like a Pirate Day 2004.” If ye don’t believe me, go walk the plank, or at least browse over to this site.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports in today’s paper (no link, I’m reading that old fashion hard-copy version) that the holiday was started “by two regular guys from Albany, Ore.” What really launched it into the mainstream, or at least wider consciousness, is that Miami Herald humor columnist Dave Barry picked up on it a couple years ago.

At any rate, the day is a celebration of “piratatude” and gives one an excuse to abuse the English language in a semi-structured way. Okay, really, as the masterminds behind this say on their web site, “silliness is the holiday's best selling point.”

My favorite part of the web site: the pirate personality test. I think it captured my style as a pirate AND as a journalist (kind of). It reads in part:

"Some men are born great, some achieve greatness and some slit the throats of any man that stands between them and the mantle of power. You never met a man you couldn't eviscerate. Not that mindless violence is the only avenue open to you - but why take an avenue when you have complete freeway access?"

Indeed, why?

Off to dinner now with my fellow pirates, er, journalists.

(This post was edited from an earlier entry to get rid of tedious verbiage and formatting.)

"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

That’s one of my favorite quotations from Shakespeare, from one of my favorite characters, Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Well, it turns out us mortals might be wising up, or at least going all 21st Century on Mr. Shakespeare. I heard this piece on one of many long drives this week, courtesy of one of North Carolina’s many fine NPR affiliates.

It tells how the British Library has put up digital images of printed in quarto. Don’t know what a quarto is? No worries, the library has some pretty good definitions.

This new online trove makes available works that used to be off limits to all but the scholarly set. The whole online exhibit is really worthwhile from what I’ve seen. It’s fascinating to see how Shakespeare’s work evolved through the years as his plays were adapted and rediscovered.

The coolest feature on the library’s site allows you to see different versions of the same play and compare them side by side. You’re not getting stuff in The Bard’s own hand since most of those manuscripts did not survive. But you’re looking at images of work that is as close to contemporary as you can get.

If you have time to kill and a high-speed connection, I’d encourage you to listen to the whole NPR report. It’s worth the investment of time just to hear the cruddy version of Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy.

As for me, I’m not off “to wive it wealthily in Padua,” but to a conference in Atlanta this weekend.

Note to self

This is a good story, and probably something I should check on for work. It raises all sorts of interesting, if troubling, issues.

At the beach

I spent Saturday and Sunday on Oak Island, N.C. with the little man and his mother. Our family and three others rented a beach house where you can watch the tide roll in from the front porch. Watch the water, drink a beer, shoot the breeze. Very relaxing.

And it’s highly entertaining to have four one-year-olds running about the house and beach all day.

Oak Island is a very mellow beach, good for families. The little man enjoys playing in the sand. Of course he does, it’s an opportunity to get dirty and stick strange objects in your mouth!

Little man is okay with the water. He could be better. I blame the camera.

You see, we had the little man and two of his friends all sitting together right where the water was lapping onto the beach. They were all have a grand time, laughing at the water, eating sand, the usual.

But we tarried to long, waiting for the perfect picture.

A wave washed up higher than its predecessors, knocking all three kids off kilter. Little man was knocked on his back. He was never in any danger but he did get a mouth full of sea water. For the rest of that day, he wasn’t keen on being anywhere near the water unless yours truly had a tight grip on him. I tried to convince him that since he had about 20,000 pounds of sand and water in his diaper (even one made for swimming) he’d be anchored, but no dice.

Live and learn.

So over all, the beach is a hit so far. Little man and his mamma are still there, while I’m on the road elsewhere. I’m looking very forward to a report of today’s activities. Except that it will probably annoy me that I’m off on a corporate exercise while I could be playing at the beach with my boy. And I’m almost certainly missing at least one round of golf.

Sigh.

On the road

Blog entries will be sporadic at best over the next week or so. I’ll be on the road eight of the next 10 days, including a short trip to the beach this weekend. The rest of my time away is work-related. With any luck I’ll be able to catch the Redskins’ season opener and the regular season return of Joe Gibbs.

Ring around the planet

The Brits are quite excited they may have discovered something new or several new somethings floating about Saturn. One of those somethings might be a new ringlet.

The equipment used to make this discovery is part of a joint venture between the U.S. and European space agencies. According to the mission specs, the thing is “the largest interplanetary craft ever built.”

The coolest part of this mission is that part of the space craft will get up close and personal with the Titan moon later this year.

Why am I telling you all this? I can’t say, really, other than it was on the BBC website and caught my eye. Maybe Mr. Sun is starting to corrupt my reading habits.

Battling the profound

I was tinkering with other, somewhat promising writing tonight, but it’s not the foremost thing on my mind. No being productive for me tonight.

Nope. Tonight there’s an urge that I recognize from my college days: the urge to be profound. It’s deadly for all but the most powerful of authors. The greats can get away with profound. For all others, it leads to the production of absolute bilge, a waste of what would barely pass for the English language if it ever saw the light of day.

In college it would manifest itself subsequent to combining of two or more of the following: beer, late night work at the newspaper office, more beer, mood-altering weather, seemingly seminal life events, bad beer, sleep deprivation, too much reading assigned by a sadistic psychology professor, and pineapple and bacon pizza.

For those who have never experienced this syndrome, here’s what happens. You sit down in a nice dark room, preferably one lit by only the glow of a computer monitor. (Substitute a bare, low-wattage bulb if using an Underwood typewriter or pen and paper.) Real work for class or your job gets put aside; it can wait while the profound is nurtured.

Ideas start pouring out of your head, it feels like you’re making mental leaps that only hours before would have seemed impossible, silly almost. Words pour forth, finally unencumbered by the strictures of academia and the harsh light of day. All of a sudden, you’ve written the most brilliant piece of prose ever produced by man. Sure you have.

The unlucky victims of the profound will e-mail their work to friends, family, professors, or local publications right away. The fortunate ones will save it, sleep after exhausting their brilliance, convinced they’ll just gussy up a few things here and there in the morning.

Morning comes. You wake. You eagerly grab for a print out of your stunning prose, but it’s gone. In it’s place some demon, some evil sprite who slipped into your room unbidden, has replaced it with absolute crap. They’re your words, but they don’t sing, they don’t even yodel. They smell as bad as the fish concoction now rotting in your roommate’s hotpot.

So tonight, a decade later, I’m sitting here in the dark. I’ve put aside something that might actually be productive. The little man turns one-year-old as of midnight. It’s raining out, remnants of a powerful and destructive storm. And I’m beginning to think I’m smarter than I am. The urge to be profound is creeping into my head.

But my better angels are cutting me off. They’re reminding me of hours of wasted work, sleep lost, print outs waded up and thrown violently into an over-full waste basket. They’re apologizing for not stepping in during the college days but explain that angels like cheap beer and pineapple pizza, a lot, even though it makes them logy. They’re telling me that I should stop contemplating the profound, stop thinking up things to tell the world that it really doesn’t want to hear, shut down the computer and go make sure the little man down the hall is covered up.

That sounds like good advice. Too bad it came about 500 words too late.

M.G. tinkers with HTML

You may have noticed some funky things happening with this page if you surfed by today (Labor Day in the U.S.). Why you’re reading blogs when you could be out playing in the sunshine or visiting friends is beyond me, but I’m not here to judge.

I have just added the HaloScan comment system, replacing Blogger comments. What I thought was going to be a three-minute job produced a series of misadventures in HTML. The long and short of it was that the pre-boiled code provided by HaloScan’s was messing with other features on the page, so I had to do a bit of hands-on tinkering to get everything to play nice together. It didn’t take very long to fix but I needed 15 minutes I didn’t have spare today in order to figure out what was going wrong.

Things seem to be relatively settled now. From this post forward, you should be seeing only one comment link that will pop open a HaloScan form. For all previous posts, you’ll see both a Blogger comment form and a HaloScan form.

Why did I do this? Because at least one reader (yeah, I mean YOU JW) asked for it. So here it is.

(This is about the sixth in a series of messages on this topic. However, it is the final one. All others have been deleted.)

With all this technical stuff sorted out, I’ll return to content production. G’night.

What I did with my weekend instead of writing blog entries:

One almost-one-year-old plus one piece of chocolate cake with gooey frosting=



Happy birthday little man.

Greensboro is … silent?

Is my web browser just playing tricks on me, or has “Greensboro is Talking” gone off the air? Is “The Shu” still out there? The URL use to be either htpp://www.greensboroistalking.com or just http://greensborotalking.com . Neither seems to work.

Update #1: Mr. "The Shu" gives us an update on his woes via comments and says he hopes to be back up soon.

Update #2: http://www.greensboroistalking.com/ is back up and running. For those who might find it interesting, he has some photos of the new Greesnboro downtown baseball stadium.

Learning to walk … or cartoon physics in everyday life

I think the Little Man must have absorbed my love of cartoons, or at least an innate understanding of physics from the coyote from the road runner.

How do I know?

Little man is learning to walk, sort of. He stands up and can wander along pretty well if he’s holding on to something like a sofa or a fence. But he’s not too keen on taking steps without support. He crawls so efficiently, I suspect learning to walk is not an imperative mission for him. (Figuring out how to open the safety lock on the kitchen cabinets, well that's another matter.)

But sometimes he forgets himself. Sometimes he’ll let go of the sofa and grab a toy with both hands. And he’ll be fine. Oh, he’ll look really happy and giggle. He’ll wave at me.

Then I screw up.

“Mason, you’re standing all by yourself! Do you want to take a step?” I’ll ask.

In the cartoon, this would be the point where the coyote runs off the cliff and keeps going until someone points out to him that he’s no longer on solid ground. Then the unfortunate critter plummets to earth, his landing marked by a crowd of dust.

As for Little Man, he gets a perplexed expression on his face and looks down. It’s like some invisible force reached up and pulls him down, some change in physics robs him of his accidentally found balance. He plops right down on his butt, his landing marked by the crinkling of a diaper, coyote like.

I know I shouldn’t laugh. I know I shouldn’t. But it’s funny, and I do.

Little Man doesn’t mind. He cocks his head, and smiles, and looks at me like I’m nuts, like I’m some 30-year-old guy who still enjoys road runner cartoons.

Making widgets … or I’m so vain I think this regulation is about me

Fair warning: This will be a rant about something arcane and pertinent mainly to newsroom folks.

Perhaps you’ve been hearing about the new rules put out by the U.S. Labor Department on overtime? They’re a pretty sweeping set of changes to how employers figure out who gets overtime and who does not.

At the end of the day, I don’t think they’ll have a lot of practical effect on me or my colleagues at the paper. Our bosses are pretty fair about dishing out the bucks when they're warranted. But the condescending language in the official bulletin on how to treat journalists with relation to overtime and the Fair Labor Standards Act is infuriating.

I’m no lawyer, and I can’t really pretend to understand all of the regulations as they were written in the Federal Register. But I’m pretty good with simple English, and I can tell you whoever wrote this simple English explanation of overtime rules for journalists lacked a clue.

Maybe it’s just an ego thing, hubris mixed vanity run amok, but the following quote from the fact sheet by the Labor Department made me want to do violence to some poor unsuspecting inanimate object:

“The majority of journalists, who simply collect and organize public information, or do not contribute a unique or creative interpretation or
analysis, are not likely to be exempt.”

Excuse me, but “a majority of journalists” do not “simply collect” information, at least that’s not what we’re supposed to be doing. At a bare minimum, we should be applying a BS filter to everything that we put in the paper/on the air.

And most journalists, from newsroom clerks on up, are thinking folks. They exercise news judgment every day. The daily paper is the result of a chain of decisions that have to be made starting about 7 a.m. that day and continuing past midnight. (Really, there are decisions that get made weeks, even months in advance, but hang with me here.)

It’s not that the regulations as issued by Labor don’t take into account that journalists can be a creative and skeptical lot. They just don’t expect it. Or rather, the authors of this opus are so arrogant/scornful/pompous that they don’t think anyone can improve upon their god-damned press releases. This regulation describes what they would like us to do; this is what they’re wishing the “majority” of us would do.

Now, I don’t mind that these folks have an opinion of what folks in my profession ought to be like, not at all. But they’ve let their theory of what they think ought to be bleed into legally binding regulations that govern the real world. In theory, someone my height and body type should be able to fit in size 36 pants, but just because I try to fit them around my fat rear doesn’t mean I’m going to be able to button them.

“Since employees’ duties vary widely, and the creative professional exemption depends on how much invention, imagination, originality or talent is actually exercised by the employee, the determination of whether an employee is exempt as a creative professional must be made on a case-by-case basis.”

So riddle me this: what counts as originality? Who decides who is exercising talent? If a reporter writes the bulk of a 25 inch story in 32 minutes from a late government meeting to beat a press deadline does that count? That’s simply reporting information that’s publicly available, but there’s a certain degree of talent that goes into it.

Copy editors don’t produce stories but they write headlines, captions and the like. They deal with the tsunami of copy us fly-boys send their way every day. They work a giant gig-saw puzzle known as layout every night. We consider them fellow-journalists. But I have no idea how they might fit in here.

Maybe this next paragraph will have some more clarification for us?

“For example, reporters who rewrite press releases or who write standard recounts of public information by gathering facts on routine community events are not exempt creative professionals. Reporters whose work products are subject to substantial control by their employer also do not qualify as exempt creative professionals. However, employees may be exempt creative professionals if their primary duty is to perform on the air in radio, television or other electronic media; to conduct investigative interviews; to analyze or interpret public events; to write editorial, opinion columns or other commentary; or to act as a narrator or commentator.”

Ok, sure, now I understand . . . No I don’t.

What makes an interview “investigative?” Does it merely require asking a question or does it require asking a question that makes someone visibly uncomfortable? Do I have to make them cry?

Am I not “interpreting” events when I distill six hours of public discourse into the account that appears in the morning paper? Would that count as being a “narrator?” Does the fact that editors read my stories before they go in the paper count as “substantial control?”

Are you getting the idea? These regulations are so vague, so poorly worded, they're meaningless to anyone who operates in the real world.

My best case scenario here is that whoever wrote these regulations and their explanation simply didn’t know much about what it is a daily journalist does. I can buy that, we’re in a weird profession. And truth be told, the fact sheets on some other jobs aren’t real clear either. (I can’t wait to see the court cases stemming from the confusion and consternation involving “Technologists and Technicians.”)

But what if there’s a worse case?

I’m not given to conspiracy theories and I will admit upfront that what I’m about to write sounds completely paranoid. But what if, just what if, this little slice of the rules interpreting Fair Labor Standards Act was designed to punish investigative reporters or reporters whose work challenges the government. Good reporting takes time, even overtime some days.

What if this was simply a way to discourage that? (It wouldn’t, mind you, because in addition to being uppity, grumpy, irreverent types, journalists are masochists. That, and a good many of us believe pretty strongly in what we’re doing. And let’s face it, there aren’t too many of us working just for the paycheck. If we were profit driven, we’d all be doing something else.)

I know. That’s just too far fetched. Government officials would never use their seats of power to punish their enemies, real or perceived.

At the end of the day, I guess I’m just irked, just plain angry, that some idiot(s) got to take their bias against my profession and make it the law of the land. Jerk(s).

WARNING: Shameless workplace promotion

No time to be artful about this: I along with two colleagues have started a blog at my day job. The link: http://blog.news-record.com/scoopblog/ . It will focus on government and politics in Guilford County, NC, and borrows the name of our paper’s longtime Saturday politics column.

Go read.